“Colonel Harcourt,” cried Priscilla pettishly, “pray come to my rescue: there’s a wasp on my book!”
The colonel obeyed the summons, but without any extraordinary alacrity; Lady Lochore’s conversation with Master Simon was unexpectedly interesting.
“Ten drops?” Master Simon was explaining. “Madness probably. More than ten, paralysis, no doubt. Twenty? Oh, twenty would be stillness for evermore—Death!”
Having duly murdered the wasp, Colonel Harcourt was chagrined to find that the new student of pharmacopœia seemed to have already had enough of her lesson. She had risen to her feet and was standing deeply reflective. Her great eyes were roaming from side to side, yet unseeing. Her lips were moving noiselessly. He went up to her. An unusual gravity was upon his smooth countenance. He bent to her ear:
“What are you saying to yourself?” he whispered.
She started, flashed round half in anger, half in mockery; then their glances met and her face grew hard.
“I was merely conning over to myself,” answered she, “our dear old necromancer’s last pregnant utterance; it sounds like a popular rhyme:
One drop gladness,
Ten drops madness,
Twice ten a living death